


The Point

by Tierfal



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drama, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-07
Updated: 2010-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 02:12:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the edge, he wavers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Point

**Author's Note:**

> You know you're too deep in fandom when you're inspired by [an article in TIME magazine](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1904132,00.html).

It looks like a long way down.

But not as long as the list of names. Not as long as the tales he's woven just trying to cover his tracks. Not as long as one more day of living with his newfound knowledge of what he's done.

This is so fucking melodramatic he wants to kill himself.

…which is convenient, given that that's why he's here.

Gravel crunches beneath the soles of his shoes as he shifts his weight, and the waves thunder against the rocks and then demurely hiss away.

It's a pity, he thinks, that it was a _Swim &amp; Racquet_ club that gave him the frame that he inhabits, all on his father's well-meaning dollar. But his clothes and his shoes should help to sink him, and even if they don't, the first impact at the foot of the cliffs will knock him unconscious, and it will be easy from there.

Easy like spelling the first name, easy like the second, and the third, and the hundredth—but somehow, when he sat down this morning, he couldn't write his own. Maybe that's _too_ easy.

Maybe he owes Kira some last flourish of grandeur before the curtain falls.

Not a bad play, all things considered, though it got a little muddled with the morality.

And that Matsuda guy was too much.

Light takes two steps closer to the edge and looks over the wrinkled expanses of the sea. He can't see the Asian continent across the water, but it's there—the world he could have had.

Light is too good at moving forward.

He supposes things will go back to normal, or as normal as they can be. Ryuk will forsake humankind, and Misa will either get arrested or precipitously mature. L will claim another inspiring victory; Light's father will eventually recover, and he'll never know the truth.

The monotone voice doesn't offer its input until he's a foot from the edge, and the wind that's currently attempting to scalp him almost drowns it out.

"You're finally free to go anywhere you like," it muses, "and this is the place you choose."

Maybe Light should push _him_ off the cliff and save himself.

But no. That's not the point. And if he'd wanted to kill L with witnesses standing by, documenting the occasion with their digital cameras, he could have done it at any point before or after…

Cameras.

Someone will have a blog, and someone will put their pictures up in high resolution, and someone will have caught L's face—

But that's _not the point_.

"It's a nice view," Light replies.

There is a pause, and he fears for the buttons on his shirt, which the wind seeks to steal away.

Not that that will matter if he follows through.

He's slightly startled to discover that he's thinking in _if_s now, that inevitability has escaped.

L has an infuriating talent for making him reconsider.

"I see only two scenarios that would bring you here," the detective remarks. "In the first, whatever you intended fell apart, and you've given up. In the second, your plans proceeded perfectly, but you've changed your mind since making them."

"And you'd like to think you're the cause of it," Light tells the wind's breath, because L will read it in the set of his shoulders anyway. "Whichever scenario it is, it was all your doing, wasn't it?"

L's sneakers slide among the dust as he steps closer. "I shouldn't presume to infringe upon Yagami-kun's martyr complex," he remarks.

"Oh," Light fires back, turning now, "but you've got one all your own. You really do, don't you—you really think that when I slept with you, everything changed."

L smiles, thinly, coldly, bitterly, with the wind slapping pink unevenly onto his white face, wreaking further havoc on soft hair that Light's fingers know very well.

The problem is that… it did. Everything _did_ change, or enough things, too many of them, because Light loved him and may still do. L wasn't a tool or a strategy—he couldn't have been then; Light hadn't known—and Light had genuinely wanted it, wanted _him_. When they met, when they clashed, when they came together, it was the physical expression of a synergy of two mirrored minds, and everything changed, because it _was_ everything. It was the only thing that mattered, and until morning broke through the curtains to pull at bared skin and rouse the spite that had faded in the dark, it had seemed like the only thing that existed at all.

But that's not the point either—not now, not anymore.

The problem is that, in those moments, in durings and afters and just-befores, seeing himself hazily reflected in wide-open storm-gray eyes, Light had realized that killing L was essentially the same as killing himself.

Come to think of it, maybe he should throw them both off the cliff.

"Would you like to know a secret, Yagami-kun?" L asks, hunched over like a hobgoblin, peering up through the whipping shadow of his bangs. "I don't care about bringing you to justice. It doesn't make a difference to me whether you're punished for what you've done, whether you even repent—all I want to know is how you did it. I want to know how you beat me, and how you won… or, at this rate, how you _would_ be winning if you weren't intent on destroying the most brilliant mind I've ever been so fortunate as to encounter." There's something like a shrug as the bent back undulates, and a familiar thumb rises to familiar lips. "You don't want the world to discover that Light Yagami is Kira. I want to know how those two became synonymous. Our goals do not conflict, Yagami-kun. I have the power to protect you, and you have the power to tell me, and only me, the truth of things." He frowns idly around his thumb. "It will be much more difficult for me to decipher your methods if you're dead."

L's infallible logic strikes again.

Light smiles, however, and revels in the flicker in the pale eyes that betrays his adversary's confusion.

"I don't owe you anything, L," he says. "I don't owe you the truth, and I don't owe you the satisfaction. Even if you tell the world I killed myself because I was Kira after all, no one's going to listen to you. I don't know if my family ever would have been able to accept me as a god, but they've always thought I was an angel, and you'll never convince them otherwise. The team knows the conditions, knows _you_, and they'll believe it was the stress of the case that drove me to this. They'll die believing it."

Characteristically, confronted with a reality of which he doesn't approve, L slips into the idiot savant. He stares intently at a place just above Light's eyes, and he gives no indication that he's heard a word since he stopped speaking.

Light holds out for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty—the wind howls between them, and his skin crawls, and his blood begins to boil.

At forty seconds, he snaps.

"_What_?" he demands of the misshapen statue standing much too close.

"The wind," L answers idly. "Your hair looks awfully stupid, Yagami-kun."

Habit moves his body without his mind's consent, and Light extends a curled fist to avenge a child's insult.

With the implausible dexterity Light always forgets, L snatches his wrist, twists it behind his back, and shoves him to his knees.

Khaki is no match for gravel, and Light feels supernova bruises burst, but the state of his skin is the least of his concerns as Mogi and Watari pick their way along the path that brought him here.

"If you had actually wanted to die," L notes, one spindly hand smoothing down his godforsaking hair, "you would have jumped the first time I spoke."

"I was waiting to take you with me," Light lies.

He focuses on the terrain beneath his knees, on its lack of mercy and its bewildering comfort, and sorts hastily through the pieces of him that the wind has scattered, broken as if the rocks and waves had earned them after all.

He feels… relieved.

Received.

Revived.

He's played an all-or-nothing game, but _something_ sounds so warm and quiet that he wants to curl up in its cradling arms and let the rest just fall away.

And when they've packed him into the back of the limo, searched him for pieces of the Note, and cuffed him like the countless that he's killed—he manages a dry laugh, and L slides an arm through his, and it isn't what he wanted, but he'll take it.

Ryuk is going to be very disappointed.

Light is going to tell him to go fuck himself.

Maybe he'll toss an apple into the bargain.

But that, of course, is not the point.

The point is the highway that unfurls before them and the cliffs they leave behind.


End file.
